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zw3.08: pulchritudinous pandas (recap.)

Intrepid journalist Hank Talbot continues his exposé of the disturbing political agenda behind the zoo world facebook propaganda blitz.

parts 1-7 recapitulated

pulchritudinous pandas

how to sustain your dragon

part 8 (recap.)

“All good things must come to an end.”

I’m sure, dear reader, that you have heard the saying before.

Most folks use it as a sagacious proverb, offering some kind of abstract consolation to those mourning the end of a good thing. This application is particularly well-suited to greeting cards. There are some “people” out there, however, who choose to use the saying in the context of formal logic, treating it as an axiom instead of a mere proverb.

(I use the term “people” loosely, because I’m mostly talking about lawyers here.)

The chief merit of the axiomatic approach is that a subjective evaluation (whether something is good) can be carried out by an objective test (whether it comes to an end). This is a great boon to the aesthetically-challenged—who tend to dislike greeting cards anyway.

Although I prefer the former approach, those lawyers can be a persuasive crowd. Here’s how it applies here:

ALL good things MUST come to an end.

rephrased:

IF a thing is good THEN it has an end.

in the contrapositive:

IF a thing has no end THEN it is not good.

more specifically:

IF Hank never stops tacking parts on to zw3 THEN zw3 is no good.

I realise it is a logical fallacy to assume that zw3 WILL be good, simply because I bring it to a close. But the logic here is clear: there isn’t a snowball’s chance of it being any good if I don’t wrap it up.

So let’s get going.

. . . with some recap.

parts 1-7 recapitulated

The whole thing began with this potentially-tittilating zoo world ad about exposed breeding:

pulchritudinous pandas

However promising the ad’s title might be, an analysis of the ad’s text and photo quickly drops the t-factor down to zero. The most interesting text is the illegible signage in the background. Some digital enhancement yielded this promising result:

live !! panda show

The idea of a “live show,” especially when considered in the context of exposed breeding, seemed strangely familiar. After a little investigative journalism, I came across this local example:

another live show

(Normally, “open sunday 5pm” wouldn’t be such an extraordinary thing that it would show up on a strip club’s street sign. In fact, one might expect the live show to be open much earlier on a sunday. This particular sunday, however, was Mother’s Day—09 May, 2010.)

As it turns out, the “Live Show” had undergone a name change sometime in the relatively recent past. The strip club used to be called the “Paper Tiger,” a phrase indelibly linked to Chairman Mao.

the tiger goes topless

(Strangely, there seems to be no surviving photographic evidence of what the old “Paper Tiger” sign looked like. This is simply an artist’s rendering of how the old signage may have appeared.)

This name change was almost certainly made for business reasons. In an attempt to gauge the effect on public perception, I pored over local archives in search of customer reviews. Pickings were slim; I won’t make unfounded allegations, but it would not surprise me if most customer reviews had been purged from the database. The best I could dig up was a positive review from trippen197, and a negative review from dan. The latter was in such an obscure dialect that it might have evaded censorship on the grounds of unintelligibility. On closer examination, dan’s peculiar prose paints a picture of petulant perspicacity: the passionate paroxysm of a person who passes on plebeian puerility in pursuit of plenary profundity . . . and winds up sounding like a total moron. When we were finally able to penetrate the shroud of his genius, the message was crystal clear: the paper tiger’s name change was just a thin layer of western whitewash, and dan was not fooled.

little red book

We then delved into Mao’s little red book, paying particular attention to chapter six: “imperialism and all reactionaries are paper tigers.” Invoking the law of the unity of opposites, Mao detailed the similar nature of imperialist and reactionary alike. An analysis of Mao’s ideology and the history of political revolution resulted in the undeniable connection: topless women.

We then explored the history of the taijitu (the yin-yan symbol), the diagram of the supreme ultimate. After a brief digression on the infinite monkey theorem, we examined the east/west split regarding the terms “supreme” and “ultimate” in an attempt to better understand the eastern mindset and the law of the unity of opposites. This led us to the fenghuang—the topless female bird that is the yin counterpart to the yang chinese dragon—the symbol of imperialism in china.